I'm not exactly unhappy with where I am in life, but where I am now is not anywhere that I ever expected to be. Aside from money, my life is pretty great. I've got wonderful kids, a fantastic husband who I've been with for a fairly long time, most of the people closest to me are fairly healthy.

In my early 20s I was kind of on track where I wanted to be going- I assumed that I'd end up a history professor, and also make a fair amount of money on the side. I did get married very young so when that broke up it derailed things for a while, but it mostly pushed me into new things that worked out well for me according to my life plan.

And then I got pregnant when I was 30, while I was in a very new relationship. I'm still not sure why I didn't have an abortion (I'd done it before), but I didn't. It seemed like a good idea to my partner and I to keep the pregnancy and get married. Which we did- I think that we'd been a couple for about 8 weeks when we got married, and the week after that we found out that it was triplets.

So that was a weird turn- if you talk to most of my friends before I was 30 I would have definitely been on the list for 'least likely to parent'. But I'm pretty good at it, and it's changed my life in astonishing ways. It was a difficult pregnancy and very premature birth, and then I got back into being online in 1995 and hosted a webpage for triplets, and met so many wonderful people through there. And then the kids were all diagnosed with autism, and one of them later got cancer, and I got divorced again- it hasn't been boring. And I mostly love it.

I'd do a couple of things that I didn't do, in retrospect. I'd travel before it became more difficult because you have other responsibilities. I don't think that I've ever heard a peer or parent or older relative say "I wish that I hadn't travelled". Do it now.

Set up a retirement fund now- it doesn't have to be huge, but just get into the habit of putting money into it when you have a spare hundred dollars or so, or 5. You won't believe how quickly you're going to be 70.

And prioritize yourself. Figure out what's important to you, and live that way. I think that I hit 25 or so when Oprah's crap and Real Simple and the Red Hat Society thing started, and we all assumed that we'd turn into cool, ass-kicking old ladies. You don't have to wait to be older to live the way you want to. Life is so short- learn to make good decisions on how to live your life, learn to weigh pluses and minuses, and go for it.